


It's Only You I Breathe

by HeartSewnToMySleeve



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Drabble, Falling In Love, Fanfiction, Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M, One Shot, Romance, Slash, zarry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 06:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartSewnToMySleeve/pseuds/HeartSewnToMySleeve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Harry reflects on meeting and falling for Zayn...</p><p> </p><p>"And it took awhile for Zayn to completely warm up to him, and to be able to trust him with the things that usually flickered behind his eyes unnamed, but Harry didn’t mind the wait.  And now they’ve reached something new. Something uncharted."</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Only You I Breathe

Harry had never expected to fall this fast. It’d never happened before. He’d searched around enough in the wrong places to have convinced himself that you can’t find things this real. Memories of faces that blur together and words that turned out not to mean much of anything at all. He’d convinced himself that that is how it is, and he was ok with it, he really was. 

Then just as he’s tying the strings on his apron and sliding behind the register in walks Zayn and ruins everything. 

He’s all lashes and cheekbones and deep brooding looks as if he’s contemplating the darkest secrets of the universe instead of his coffee order. He steps a little closer and Harry has to take a half step back, because it’s all a little too much. A faint smile plays across his features (there’s a moment where Harry can’t breath), and he seems to have decided. And he seems a little shy, and this surprises Harry, because you’d think someone who looks like that would just walk around like they owned the world, but he doesn’t. And there’s a sort of sad flicker in his eyes like he might be something just to the left of broken. He stands there shifting his weight from foot to foot and tugging on his bottom lip with his teeth for just a second before finally spitting out his order, and sliding a few crumpled bills across the counter to Harry. Harry has to give his head a little shake so he can remember to do something besides stare.

And Harry’s not quite sure how, but it progresses (slowly) from there. Zayn starts coming in later and later in the day and staying just a little bit longer, slowly inching closer to the time that Harry can untie his apron strings and slide out from behind the counter. Soon they are taking turns walking eachother home, and Harry’s best friend Louis is constantly making fun of him (Harry pretends to be annoyed, but really he’s not). 

He and Zayn are spending more and more time together, and Zayn’s sad eyes come around less and less. Harry learns that Zayn has a sort of unexpectedly goofy side to him, that underneath those deep dark eyes there’s a person just like Harry. And yeah, maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising to him, but Zayn had just seemed so otherworldly to Harry, like he might have just stepped off a cloud and decided that the heavens weren’t for him, and maybe he’d give slightly grungy coffee shops a shot instead. 

And it took awhile for Zayn to completely warm up to him, and to be able to trust him with the things that usually flickered behind his eyes unnamed, but Harry didn’t mind the wait. And now they’ve reached something new. Something uncharted. 

Harry’s never wanted to dig so deep and know every little thing about a person, but he does now. And no one had ever wanted to dig so deep into him, but now someone does. And they spend hours with shovels in hand, digging through pleasantries and thinly veiled insecurities, tearing off masks to find what’s really buried underneath. And maybe at first they were both a little scared that one of them would dig too deep and bolt like a shyed horse, but now Harry’s falling hard and fast, and he feels fine. Safe in a way he’s never felt before. And maybe Zayn feels the same, because now when Harry tells him jokes that even he knows are lame he smiles a smile that Harry thinks may have been hidden for awhile. It made up of crinkly eyes, and it speaks of sunshine and first kisses. It makes Harry’s heartbeat erratic and unpredictable. 

And all the broken pieces that used to make up Harry’s heart slowly slide into place with each whisper and each kiss. And he feels whole, and Zayn whispers similar sentiments into his skin late at night when there’s no space between them. 

And now they're always connected one way or another. Sometimes is a hand placed on the small of a back, or it's fingers all tangled together, or an entire body sat just a little too close to the one next to it. And a small smile becomes a permanent fixture on his face. And when he thinks it's only Zayn that's on his mind, and when he breathes it's only Zayn, and if you cut open his heart it would just bleed him. 

And before they had been at this for long it already felt so right, and Harry couldn’t remember what it was like before. Before everything was ZaynZaynZayn. He knows it's way too soon to be thinking about words like 'forever' and 'the one' but they flit around in his head anyways. So now he knows it’s already too late for him, too late for him to ever to be ok without Zayn again. 

And for the past week and a half three little words have been sitting right on the edge of his lips. He is constantly having to bite at them so they don’t tumble out. But it doesn’t take long before it’s too much and Harry is caught off guard, accidentally spilling them out during a completely mundane conversation about order in Chinese food. So Harry winces a bit and closes his eyes, but Zayn doesn’t miss a beat before saying the same three words with a ‘too’ tacked onto the end, punctuating it with a kiss to Harry's cheek, and going right back to the kung pao chicken.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading this indulgent thing. The title is a line from the song that made me start writing it, though it sort of had a mind of it's own and went in a completely different direction so....


End file.
